Title: After 50 years of ridicule, denial and cover-up, is the real
truth about alien abductions about to be revealed? by Geoffrey Wansell

On a hot, sticky July afternoon in 1987 Jason Andrews is celebrating his
fourth birthday at his family's cottage near Slade Green in Kent when
the heavens open.

As the thunder crashes all around, there is a single flash of lightning.
Suddenly, a stream of numbers starts pouring out of Jason's mouth:
fantastic numbers, complex mathematical equations, even algebra - all
from a boy who struggles to count to ten.

Seconds later the windows and doors begin to shake violently and the
four-year old announces to his mother, father and elder brother:
`They're waiting for me. I have to go.'
Jason's father, Paul, grabs his son and stops him from walking out into
the downpour, but the boy struggles violently, and as he does so the
house shakes to its very foundations until, finally, he seems to wake
from a trance and the shaking stops.
It is the first sign that Jason Andrews is no ordinary little boy and,
in the eight years that follow, that is dramatically confirmed.
It wasn't until 1995, when he was almost 12, that Jason told his
astonished parents exactly what had been happening to him - aliens had
been abducting him from his bed at night.
`It's always the light that comes first,' he confessed to his mother, Ann.
`Then I see the tall one rise up at the foot of the bed.
`Suddenly there's lots of little ones everywhere. They're fuzzy and
indistinct, and they move very fast. I can't move or speak, but I'm
awake and I can see and hear and feel. I want to scream and run, but the
sound doesn't come out and my body doesn't move.

`I hate them. I hate them,' the boy sobbed. `I have to go with them.
`They take me to an operating theatre, like at the hospital. It's all
white and shiny Sometimes it's a circular room with It's always cold.
`They're there. The big one touches me but I don't feel it, like as if
I've had an anaesthetic.' Then he added poignantly: `But you don't
believe me, you just think I'm making it all up.' In fact, Ann did
believe him, and went on to explore the phenomena affecting her son's
life in a hook, Abducted. This decent, uncomplicated wife and mother
came to the conclusion that we may not be alone.
Now, the rest of the world may be about to agree with her After five
decades of ridicule, official denials and alleged cover-ups, the
possibility that aliens. may have visited Earth is beginning to be taken
seriously - and not just by sci-fi fanatics and UFO freaks.
Scientific researchers are increasingly convinced that thin,
grey-skinned beings about 4ft tall, with large almond-shaped eyes set in
an oval, hairless, head, may not only have landed on earth, but have
also abducted human beings for bizarre experiments; while all the time
there has been an official conspiracy to keep their visits secret.
Tonight American filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the man who brought the
world Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and ET, will bring those
convictions - and aliens - to life in his new mini-series, Taken, on BBC2.
A cunning mixture of. fact, conjecture and fiction, based on the latest
research, it tells the story of how aliens affected the lives of three
American families over the past half century.
A massive hit in the U.S., where it was broadcast on consecutive nights
last month, Spielberg's series is the most expensive TV science faction
drama ever made - with a budget of more than £25 million - and it's
certain to re-ignite public debate on this forever-contentious subject.
But surely all this talk of aliens is far-fetched? As a natural sceptic,
I've always believed so, b ut over the past weeks and months of
reviewing the evidence I've come to the conclusion that it does, in
fact, warrant the closest investigation.
There certainly seems to have been an official conspiracy to keep the
facts secret.
In the past few months, for example, firm evidence about unexplained
events connected with Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and
extraterrestrial phenomena has begun to appear for the first time as
governments around the world have released previously secret documents.
And, for the first time, politicians have started to admit that evidence
on the possibility of extraterrestrial life has been concealed.
In October last year, for example, former White House Chief of Staff
John Podesta, who worked for President Clinton, called on the U.S.
government to de-classify `records that are more than 25 years old' and
`to provide scientists with data that will assist them in determining
the real nature of this phenomenon'.
Only four years ago, former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher hinted to
British UFO researcher Georgina Bruni that there was considerable secret
information on the subject, adding mysteriously : 'You can't tell the
people.'
Bruni was so struck by the remark that she used it as the title for her
2001 book on alien sightings in Suffolk in 1980. Shortly afterwards,
former Tory Secretary of State also confided to her on the subject: 'I
know a lot, but I tell a little.'
After a campaign by Bruni and other researchers, the Government last
month released scores of secret files on UFO sightings in this country,
all of which suggest that aliens can no longer be dismissed merely as
the product of fevered imaginations.
Certainly the majority of the public now seem to believe that aliens do
exist. As the editor of the British UFO magazine, Graham Birdsall,
points out: `Sixty years ago, 90 per cent of the population thought the
idea was "absolute rubbish".
`Now every single opinion poll on the subject shows that millions of
people firmly believe in UFOs.'
Last June, for example, when it was announced that Bonnybridge in
Scotland boasted more UFO sightings than any other place in the world, a
Sky News poll showed 65 per cent of its viewers believed in UFOs.
Five years earlier - in one of the biggest telephone polls ever
conducted on TV - 100,000 viewers phoned ITV to answer the question
`Have aliens already visited Earth?' and 92 per cent voted `Yes'.
`There's strong evidence to suggest that Earth has been visited by
extraterrestrial intelligence,' insists Birdsall.
And after my own research I am prepared to admit that it is no longer
possible to dismiss people such as Birdsall as `cranks'.
Spielberg, whose film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind dramatically
raised the issue of alien encounters for a global audience, is certainly
convinced they've happened.
Fascinated by the possibility from childhood, he's devoted part of his
life to discovering the truth and has become an authority on the subject
as a result.
But there is a striking difference between Spielberg's approach in his
TV series Taken and the one he took two decades ago in ET.
This time the aliens he is . depicting are not trying to phone home
they're here to subvert, and ultimately control, the human race.
And the new TV series, his first since the award-winning Band Of
Brothers, is not only about the arrival of aliens, it's also about
`alien abductions'. `I thought I couldn't do justice to this genre in a
two-hour movie,' Spielberg explains. `We would need a lot more time to
do justice to the history of alien abductions, starting back in 1947,
right through to today'
Watching the first episodes, it's clear that Spielberg has done
everything in his power to create a fictional series' on the edge of
fact. This is no sci-fi comic book, no Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,
but a compelling and all-too-plausible - drama.
British UFO expert Mike Soper, of Contact International, is as convinced
as Spielberg that alien abductions have happened.
The telling fact is that there are features common to all the people's
stories,' he maintains. `They all remember being taken to a craft, and
often talk about being "examined". . `Many talk about something being
"implanted" in their bodies, and when they return they often have
triangular marks on their bodies and aren't wearing exactly the same
clothes they were before the abduction'.
Ministry of Defence civil servant Nick Pope, 37, agrees.
`Abductions most definitely do occur,' he says. `And although the phrase
"alien abductions" is a gift to those people who want to deride it,
there are genuine, ordinary people who believe they have been in
extraordinary situations.'
Pope isn't a man with an anorak and a slightly weird look in his eyes.
He is a down-to-earth civil servant who had no interest in aliens at all
until 1991, when the MOD asked him to investigate reports of UFOs, alien
abductions and other strange phenomena.
'The 100 or so people I interviewed about being abducted by aliens
weren't publicity seekers merely after their fifteen minutes of fame,'
he explains.
'I came to the conclusion that some of these people had to be telling
the truth. And if just one of the abductees' reports is true, the
implications for the human race would be profound and disturbing.'
One person who helped to convince Pope was 37 year old British - born
make-up artist Bridget Grant, whom he met seven years ago.
She addressed an audience of 750 people at the British UFO conference in
Leeds in 2001, where she talked about her abduction. She explained that
in February 1993, when she was living in Los Angeles; she was driving
with a friend in the Brentwood area at 5.50pm one bright, sunny day when
she drew up at a set of traffic lights.
`I suddenly saw this silver tip out of the corner of my eye,' she
explained. `Then, I saw that it was a solid silver craft, with a
red-orange colour underneath it, about 35 - 45 ft in diameter. It came
right above the car and I leaned towards the steering wheel and looked
up.' The craft `flew really, really low' over her head, she said, and
away to the west, Her friend Jane, sitting in the passenger seat, saw
it, too.
Grant was so disturbed by the experience that in September 1998 she went
to see the American UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, of the Intruders
Foundation in New York, to undergo four sessions of `regressive hypnosis'. .
She wanted his help to remember the exact details of what happened on
that afternoon in 1993 because she thought she had forgotten something.
It appeared that she had. For when this pale young 'woman, with shoulder
length dark hair; addressed the Leeds audience she told them she'd not
just seen the spacecraft but had been abducted by it, even though she
thought she was in her car the entire time.
`There is often a time shift element in the stories of abduction, where
the individual doesn't realise that time. has passed,' explains Nick Pope.
`My hands were gripping the steering wheel,' Grant explained to the
conference. `But then I felt a pressure, like my body was being sucked.
It felt like all the atoms of my body were going through the steering
wheel. `Then I saw this being. I was fascinated by its appearance - it
was transparent, had white hair and was carrying a baby.'
Hard though it may be for some to believe, and Grant is reluctant to
discuss the events further, ``there is no doubt that the artists'
impression of the being which she said she saw looks uncannily like many
of the other descriptions of aliens that have surfaced in recent years.
However, as sceptics point out there have been so many depictions of
'space creatures' with dome heads and large oval eyes that it is hardly
surprising that this has become something of a stereotype.
When Spielberg was researching the aliens for Close Encounters, he held
lengthy consultations with the veteran American astronomer Dr J Allen
Hynek - a once- fierce critic of UFOs and alien phenomena who changed
his mind completely after he became a consultant on the subject for the
United States Air Force.
Hynek assembled the authoritative American dossier on alien encounters,
Project Blue Book, and advised Spielberg what aliens looked like.
But the idea that little grey - rather than green - men with elongated
fingers, legs and neck,
sounds incredibly far-fetched - until you talk to Georgina Bruni. `When
I interviewed Lady Thatcher a few years ago,' Bruni explains, 'I was
describing to her the fact that US military personnel here in Britain
had reportedly had contact with, aliens, and an alien spacecraft, in
Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk in December 1980. `I expected her to tell
me that I'd been watching too many episodes of the X Files, But she
didn't look shocked at all. She just said, twice: "You can't tell the
people."
With Bruni's encouragement, in the wake of this conversation Lord
Hill-Norton, a former Chief of the Defence Staff tabled 18 Parliamentary
questions in the House of Lords - as a result of which the Government
released more than 200 previously secret files concerning UFOs and aliens.
One of the files revealed that then Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill
wanted the matter investigated in 1952.
He sent a memo to his scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, asking:
`What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it
mean? What is the truth?'
After several months, Tizard reported that all the sightings were
'explicable by natural events, although shortly afterwards the
Government explicitly banned RAF personnel from discussing sightings
with anyone not from the military.
The U.S. Government had adopted a similar policy of official secrecy
five years earlier, in the wake of a spate of incidents near the US Air
Force base at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1949 - incidents that
Spielberg uses as his starting point for his TV series.
And so the modern history of UFOs, aliens and official cover-ups was born.
British UFO researcher Jenny Randles, who has spent more than 20 years
investigating UFO and alien phenomena, maintains that in more recent
times alien kidnapping has become much more common,
`An ever growing tide of people suspect that they may be alien
abductees,' she says.
So is it fact or fiction? I'm not certain, but the evidence of witnesses
such as Jason Andrews and Bridget Grant is hard to ignore. And it's
clear that, as the 2lst century begins, opinions are changing.
The Government announced recently that it was `open-minded' about the
`existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life forms' a markedly
different official position from the one taken half a century ago.
Perhaps the politicians are beginning to accept that we are not alone.
Steven Spielberg certainly does.